


Shed your seal-skin by the sea shore.

by baobaobakery



Series: Shed your seal-skin by the sea shore. [1]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Selkie - Freeform, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-22 07:58:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17055914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baobaobakery/pseuds/baobaobakery
Summary: "When we were kids, you were just, like, the worst lady-in-waiting," said Mermista. "Like my whole court still isn't over how bad you did that whole, I don't know, waiting? Thing? That you were supposed to do.""Could it be, possibly, because--" smirked Sea Hawk, his head resting peacefully on her shoulder, "--I had to boldly invent my career change?"She sighed irritably; the warmth of familiarity made her boyfriend smile. "No. Clowns are literally, just, already a thing. So maybe go back to clown college and teach there."He squeezed her arm gently. "And leave you without-- Me? Oh! Never, my love."





	Shed your seal-skin by the sea shore.

As any princess must do when their kingdom has suffered an attack: Survey the damage with a fortified heart.

Glancing slowly at the damages, Mermista couldn't help but inhale sharply, grimacing.

Wobbly agar bits, traces of brightly colored attempts at jellies, rest in dishes in messily taste-tasted bits and pieces. Counter space was non-existent. Nothing renders despair quite as much as being able to track butter knife scratches permanently scraped into the bottoms of a fleet of battered pans. Fingerprints track across the lapis walls, cocoa powder tufted in uneven patches, terribly incapable of blending against the translucent glass-pane blues so common to the regional aquarian architecture. Flour clung stubbornly to the deepest recesses of appliance nooks and crannies, most irritatingly of all, binding dry and hot to the outer metal of stove tops, forming stubbornly crusted layers. That'll take hours to scrub by hand and soap.

The only redeeming aspect of this chaos were the warm drafts of cardamom scent that filled the vast kitchen. Crumbled, heated dried nuts and fragments of dried fruit added an achingly nostalgic waft amid a syrupy fog. Confectionary chaos reigned with a heart as tender and courageous as the instigator of the mess.

Inhale. Exhale. Steeling breaths were necessary to figure out what friendly calamity tore through the expansive kitchen.

"Hey? Lady-in-waiting?" she ventured, cautiously.

Shuffling footsteps.

The creak of a cabinet door being swiftly, but gingerly shut.

Could it be that--

Mermista pursued her lips angrily, shoulders rigidly held as she cautiously navigated around misshapen towers of sullied blenders, stacked bowls, discarded frosting bags.

"Don't--" And the shuffle of panicked footsteps intensified, raising her pulse, "Seriously, I said _don't_ try to get away from me. Are you kidding me?" She strode around pillars of colossal kitchen junk, her dense brows furrowing at the sheer volume of mess. This was not an amateur's carelessness. Such a tsunami of stark grossness could only be orchestrated by a genuinely determined buffoon. Someone, and the thought made Mermista groan internally, who was putting in an effort.

Striding past a blanket of baking powder that clogged up the coral-bumpy floor, she blinked rapidly in consternation. 

There, she caught sight of the perpetrator. Her clear brown eyes widened.

"Celia--"

And who else could it have been? Clad in a tan leather jacket, the wide-shouldered figure at the window froze. Up to a quart of excessively whipped cream slid in glacier-slow globules of pastel greens, turquoise, seagrass making a slow descent through what seemed like acres of bountiful hair-- You could barely glimpse any of the richly dark purple tresses that normally fanned across a strong, broad back. 

One enterprising leg dangled at the ledge of a porthole window, two muscular arms bent in a disrupted attempt to twist open the hatch and escape.

"Well! Ha! A-ha-ha-ha," said the guilty person, trying to casually brush away a lump of damp sugar but instead smearing it across a bare upper lip by accident. "I see you've, ah, caught a sneak peak of your birthday present."

"Sure," said Mermista. She folded her arms across her chest. Despite her commandeering action, silky fabric garnished with gold-spun thread elicited no noise, a masterpiece of a sari embroidered with golden lush sea life. A closer inspection could reveal that each tiny jellyfish component of the larger pattern was stitched hardly bigger than the nail on a pinky finger. The gentle luminosity accentuated the beautiful dark brown of her skin. Stunning as she looked, the subtle opulence of her birthday outfit only added fuel to her anxious irritation-- even a breath of powdered sugar might spoil the care with which she had to appear before the royal court in the evening.

"This is a weird thirteenth birthday present," Mermista muttered. "Are you literally trying to escape now?"

"No!" Yes. "Well, I just thought I'd-- go for a refreshing swim, maybe come back in a bit--" And even caught in the act of abandoning a huge mess, the person focusing on transforming.

"Get back here!" Mermista gripped the back of the tan leather jacket, which at this point in transformation, had almost lost all of the cloth outline in favor of becoming sleek, dense fur. Chastened, Celia reversed the process, once more reverting to a bipedal land shape.

"Well! You got me," chortled Celia. Falling slack to deliberately be swept up by Mermista's strength, the lack of resistance meant that Celia flopped back into the princess' bangle-covered arms.

"Care to tell me why you're ditching all of this? I'm seriously not making anyone else pick up after you."

"I would've come back. Done something about--" A generous palm waved in an arc. This gesture encompassed all of the glorious wreckage, including one annoyed teen princess. "-- the, ah, collateral. But I promise. You'll love the birthday cake. Tall as we were, the day that we met."

Mermista groaned. "Yeah, that's what every girl wants. To eat a cake the size of an actual toddler."

For this sarcasm, Mermista received a sincere finger-point in the face, just an inch away from her eyes. She swatted this away irritably, just as her friend crowed, "Ex-ACT-ly. Exactly! And I've already had it sent out to be at your dinner banquet tonight. I would have cleaned up this mess, I just needed a break. A long break."

"A shower?"

"That pains me." Something tightened in Celia's voice, which alarmed Mermista in such a way that the annoyance dropped from her expression. Celia's voice usually never diminished; that meant a deeply genuine blow. "Look, a benefit of living in a water based society is that I rarely have to actually undress to get clean."

Mermista filed that bit away to talk about later. For now, responsibility needed to be enforced. "Not that I don't care, but I don't think I get what you're trying to say, and for now-- don't distract me. Why are you ditching this huge mess? It's not fair to the other castle staffers to just act like this is for someone else to handle."

"I really was going to clean up," Celia whined, in an oddly sincere way. "I just didn't know who was entering the East Wing kitchen! Everyone else should've been in the West Wing kitchen, since that's closer to the ballroom of your party, and I just like to cook in private."

Mermista pinched the bridge of her nose. "Explain."

"I mean, if it's you, then it's fine. It's just-- It's that--" Celia faltered. "I don't want to give anyone else more reasons to think that I'm not. That I'm very. I don't like doing things that look traditionally feminine."

The princess' brows furrowed in concentration. "Plenty of men will bake. It's not like, an exclusively womanly thing to do."

"But no one sees me as a man."

Mermista held Celia's gaze. Several breathless heartbeats passed between them.

"Is that. Like. Would you like that?" Mermista said, carefully. 

"Yes," said her childhood friend.

"Then-- Look, we'll clean this up later. Tomorrow, I mean, you're not getting out of this-- but I'm." She took a deep breath. "I'm glad you told me. No, I mean, I'm serious. I'm grateful. Do you want this to be a secret?"

"ABSOLUTELY NOT," barked Celia, excited as a wet dog shaking out a flurry of moisture. "I mean, with a princess backing me up, who would challenge me?"

I wouldn't put it past some of these people, Mermista thought privately, but I'll stop them dead in their tracks if they tried. 

Aloud, she said, "So, is Celia what you want to be called? Do you want me to use.. other? Words? To refer to you?"

"Yes, but--" Two frosting covered hands reached to gently grasp the henna-patterned pair of hands. "For now, we should celebrate! In song."

Mermista groaned, but didn't break the swaying chain of her friend's hands as he launched into a cheerful song.


End file.
